In Star Wars: Queen's Shadow, there is a conversation between Padmé and Sabé:
“Do you like him enough?”, Padme said.
“I don’t know,” Sabé said. “We’ve talked about it, so it’s not like I’m leading him on. And I warned him. A lot. And he’s known me, us, for a long time.”
“You’re protecting him.” It wasn’t quite a question. As usual, they walked the line of their peculiar bond with perfect symmetry.
“I don’t want to be callous,” Sabé said. “So in a way, I am protecting myself, too.”
“I don’t know what I’d do,” Padmé said. “I’ve guarded my heart against everything for so long, always aware of the dynamics and the flow of power. I’ve been lucky to find so many people who understand that and give me that space. I’m afraid that if someone breaks through, I’ll let them, and it would be catastrophic.”
“It’s not a reactor leak,” Sabé said.
Padmé never spoke to her about matters of the heart, largely, Sabé suspected, out of respect for privacy. She wondered who Padmé was thinking of that made her do it now, or if Padmé was merely intrigued by the prospect of whatever she imagined Sabé was getting up to. She wasn’t the jealous type, but she’d always been curious, and Sabé rarely did anything first.
“Maybe you should let someone break through a little bit,” Sabé suggested. “To see how it goes.”
Now I think that "she" in the bold sentence refers to Sabé herself, but due to the mentioning of "Sabé" in the same line, it seems to refer to Padmé! To which one of them "she" refers?
Best Answer
When we name someone and then use a pronoun, it usually refers to the same person. Subsequent uses of the same pronoun can usually be assumed to mean the same person, so long as nobody else has been named between times.
But in your example, the pronoun comes first and then Sabe is named. This is normally done to differentiate or 'switch' between persons who may share the same pronoun. So, it seems pretty clear that 'she' refers to Padme.